Hunger is a ‘silent crisis’ in the USA

Merisol Bello USA Today, April 16, 2014

Tianna Gaines Turner can’t remember the last time she went to bed without worrying about how she was going to feed her three children. She can’t remember the last time she woke up and wasn’t worried about how she and her husband would make enough in their part-time jobs to buy groceries and pay utilities on their apartment in a working-class section of Philadelphia. And she can’t remember the last time she felt confident she and her husband wouldn’t have to skip meals so their children could eat. Twenty-eight hundred miles away in a middle-class section of Van Nuys, Calif., similar worries press on Nikki Maxwell and her husband. The two lost their jobs during the recession and now work part time making half their former income. They face a daily struggle to feed their three children, Maxwell says. She remembers the first time she had to turn to a food pantry for help because she had no other options.”I remember feeling really hopeless,” Maxwell says. “I was depressed. I didn’t know what to do. I was drowning under the weight of it.” Read more at: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/16/hunger-crisis-recession/7559713/